Any book will not be helping you use linoleum throughout your entire house.

If you can possible afford it, use site-finished hardwood floors throughout the entire house, and chose a medium brown tone - not too read, not too pale, not too dark. It will work with any color you end up painting walls over the years.

Thank you. I am really interested in color-related principles.

Your best option could be to hire an interior designer for a few hours of his/her time. Colour principles are all well and good, but they do NOT take into account the DIRECTION and quality of light throughout a home. Personal preference is hard to pin-point in the theory of design.

I personally like to put this type of research into a financial equation. I like to convert "my time" into dollars and then calculate the $$$ value to the time it will take me to COMPLETELY absorb and then implement the information effectively (like a design student's final project to graduate from college).

Colour principles make up the majority of interior design (50%-70% of course load). If you assume it takes 2 years of study, then you can then push this to 1 year worth of study is needed to become competent. A year of study is worth 200 - 500 hours (depending on your college of course).

Now give yourself an hourly wage. If you assume $1/hour, you will pay yourself $200 - $500 to acquire this knowledge. No one that I know of are paid $1/hr. I would pop that up to $10/hr. That means you will "spend" $2000 - $5000 of your time to achieve this level of competence. Even $10/hr is low for Canada (minimum wage is higher than that). Imagine if you are professional of any sort...now pay yourself the actual amount that you make per hour. The cost climbs very, very quickly.

I'm very sure an Interior Designer could offer 10 hours of his/her time for $1500 - $2500. And you would achieve the same result.

Just something to think about.

Learning about interior design is not like learning to patch some drywall by watching a YouTube tutorial. The process by which a lay person becomes educated about these principles takes exposure and effort. You have to expose yourself to good design and you have to bother to study what are the principles that make good design. Some people are fortunate enough to begin their education at home through their parents. Others learn exclusively from professionals or through schooling. Whatever the modality of learning, I am not sure there is any one book that is going to help you achieve a goal that is as out of the box as what you are asking.

To paraphrase TS Elliott, you have to know the rules in order to break them. You want to break a rule- of course it can be done well, but it would take a very talented person with a great deal of experience to have a solid grasp on how to do that. You run the risk of laying down linoleum that will look bland and boring like in an institutional setting or you will have a result that looks garish.

If I were you I would start by looking at lots of pictures of houses that use linoleum throughout and see what appeals to you and what does;t and try to figure out the why some things work and some don't and if those things can be translated into your house- note, if a house with huge volumes successfully deploys colorful linoleum, will that translate to a more modest house (probably not- scale matters- a great deal.)

Good luck with your project. It can probably be done. You just need to invest in the design process- lots of time or money. One or the other.

Thank you for your insightful comments. I'm looking for resources that can help me organize my preferences into a coherent concept. I did go to the library today, and found two books that seem to offer a useful collection of photos and ideas that suit the overall style I prefer: Terence Conran's Plain Simple Useful (2014), and Julie Carlson's Remodelista (2013). There were a few color theory books in the catalog that looked useful, but none of them were available on the shelves.

Based on what appeals to me, the style and the orientation of the house, I'm gathering together that I will need to choose among pale/warm, pale/cool, medium/warm and medium/cool, with possible/occasional deep coloring/shading, according to my preferences, room use, and the affects of natural light in each room. It would be great to get one or two references that will help me think about such conundrums as warm toned floors and pale walls and ceiling, vs cool floors and warm walls and ceiling, etc.

Most likely I *will* end up hiring a designer, but only after I have a better idea of what I want. Our architect is competent to go a fair way into design territory, but as that is not his primary work, I want to be armed with my own understanding. I also *really like* this stuff.

You can go the Forbo.com and look at options. Here are some samples of their sheet linoleum, but you may have already seen these.

I would not change floors if there is not a threshold to separate the rooms. One thing about linoleum is that it will have to be replaced after a certain amount of time, but some people like to make these changes. You might get 10 to 12 years of use out of a floor, but not much more than that. Personally, I prefer stone tiles to Marmoleum, but that is my particular taste.

The Armstrong web site will allow you to visualize rooms with different floorings, and I think you need a good rendering of your space with the different options in order to make a decision. If you can get floor plans from your architect, then you can probably take that to one of the flooring suppliers and have them do a rendering for you.

Here's a site explaining basic color theory:

https://colormatters.com/color-and-design/basic-color-theory

You might want to read Maria Killam's Colour Me Happy blog

She talks a lot about undertones. Her website:
Maria Killam

To paraphrase TS Elliott, you have to know the rules in order to break them.

“It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.” ~ T.S. Eliot